http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Non-free_content#Interesting_ima...
Can anyone honestly say that this free image has the same educational value as the fair use image? Yet that's exactly what's being argued. You can't even see his face in the free image.
On Fri, Feb 29, 2008 at 8:39 AM, Ken Arromdee arromdee@rahul.net wrote:
Can anyone honestly say that this free image has the same educational value as the fair use image? Yet that's exactly what's being argued. You can't even see his face in the free image.
In that particular case, I'd personally agree with you that the free-licensed picture is not adequate.
Unfortunately, most of the time, arguments on Wikipedia aren't about the actual case in front of us, but between bands of people afraid of precedent being set, or wanting precedent to be set. There's a reasonable 'thin end of the wedge' worry that if we add a subjective criterion to the current policy on when fair use images are acceptable, some people will take it and run with it and before we know it, there'll be a hole in policy big enough to drive a truck through.
This is not an unreasonable fear, either. We frequently have fans wanting to replace our amateur photos of celebrities taken during public appearances with professional photographs under a claim of fair use. The vast majority of our freely-licensed photos could be replaced by a better fair-use image, I suspect.
Realistically, the worry is not so much that that argument would win the day, but that it would open up a lot more edit wars and arguments that could not be so easily countered with hard-edged policy.
This is not a view I wholly agree with, by the way; I fear that we have a long-term trend towards ironclad, no-exceptions, zero-tolerance policies because people would rather have easy than right, and because the querulous and stubborn can argue others to exhaustion on subjective points. This would not be the Wikipedia I signed up for.
-Matt
On Fri, 29 Feb 2008, Matthew Brown wrote:
Unfortunately, most of the time, arguments on Wikipedia aren't about the actual case in front of us, but between bands of people afraid of precedent being set, or wanting precedent to be set. There's a reasonable 'thin end of the wedge' worry that if we add a subjective criterion to the current policy on when fair use images are acceptable, some people will take it and run with it and before we know it, there'll be a hole in policy big enough to drive a truck through.
But in this case, the policy says "where no free equivalent is available".
In other words, the policy *already has a subjective criterion in it*.
It's not someone refusing to add a subjective criterion, it's someone refusing to use the one we already have.